Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) will boycott the Beijing Olympics should the title of the Taiwanese Olympic team be changed to Zhongguo Taibei (中國台北, or Taipei, China), which implies that Taiwan is part of China, a high-ranking KMT official said yesterday.
KMT Secretary-General Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said Wu Poh-hsiung would travel to Beijing to attend the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games on Aug. 8 and the Taiwanese baseball team’s first match against the Netherlands on Aug. 13 if the Chinese authorities respect Olympic protocol and refer to the Taiwanese team as Zhonghua Taibei (中華台北, Chinese Taipei) rather than Zhongguo Taibei.
“We will boycott the Olympics if Beijing maneuvers to belittle Taiwan by playing word games,” Wu Den-yih said.
TEAM
He made the remarks after China’s Chinese Central Television and Xinhua news agency referred to Taiwan’s Olympic delegation on Wednesday as Zhongguo Taibei when reporting that Taiwan had selected its Olympic team.
Because of pressure from China, Taiwan has been forced to participate in international sports events under the English title Chinese Taipei since 1981, based on a protocol signed with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
An agreement signed between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in Hong Kong in 1989 states that all sports teams or organizations representing Taiwan will follow IOC regulations when participating in sports events in China.
The two sides also agreed that Taiwan should be referred to as Zhonghua Taibei in Chinese characters in any of the Games’ publications or public information, including brochures, invitation letters, athletic badges and media broadcasts.
Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said on Thursday that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) met the Cabinet recently to discuss the issue and reached a consensus that Chinese Taipei — the name used by Taiwan’s Olympic Committee at international sports events — must be translated as Zhonghua Taibei.
STANCE
Noting the president’s firm stance on the issue, Wang expressed hope that Beijing would stop “using their old tricks” to avoid unnecessary disputes in the run-up to the Olympics.
KMT spokesman Lee Chien-jung (李建榮) said that Wu Poh-hsiung had accepted Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) invitation to attend the Olympics’ opening ceremony during his meeting with Hu in May.
However, the KMT had informed Beijing that Wu would cancel his trip to the Olympics if China insisted on changing the name of the Taiwanese Olympic team.
“The KMT insists that Chinese Taipei should only be translated as Zhonghua Taibei… hopefully Beijing would cherish recent positive developments in cross-strait relations and respect our stance,” Lee said.
Lee dismissed a report by the Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday saying Wu Poh-hsiung would take the occasion to have a second “Wu-Hu meeting” during the Olympics. Lee said the party had no plans to arrange such a meeting.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat
RSS